therese

Looks great, Lucy. Is the glass of wine crucial to the success of the dish? I'll assume so.

So, a cooking question for the France forum: When making clafoutis (the traditional version, with cherries, though I also like it with apricots or prunes) do French cooks generally use cherries with or without pits? Is there a difference between home and restaurant practice? If pits are left in, is it more a question of tradition or is there an improved or additional flavor (presumably of almonds, though also presumably pretty faint)?

Eat and/or do whatever you want. Whatever it was that immediately preceded onset of labor gets credit for jumpstarting it. I would specifically not recommend induction of labor just to get the pregnancy over with, not only because an induced labor if you're not ready will either not work (C-section, anyone?) or be long and tedious and exhausting (and food-deprived), but because you're pretty much jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Infants are much easier to care for in utero.

Ideally it must occur in France, you must be French and the food has to cooked by a Frenchman or woman. I'm afraid so... We're in the France forum discussing French cooking. So one person shared an experience, very poetically. I suppose if this person had such a culinary moment in Hoboken it would have been called the "Hoboken epiphany" in the New Jersey forum. Sure it can occur anywhere. The thing about epiphanies is that time and place are hard to predict... hard to say who will have one, if ever... ← Very true. The original query was why so few questions about French cooking are posted to this forum. So, asked and answered.

What makes this epiphany particularly French? Is it necessary that the epiphany occur in France? Must one actually be French, or would it suffice simply be eating French food cooked with French ingredients by a Frenchman? If the epiphany occurs outside the French context (and yes, it does) is it somehow diminished?

Hockey, beer, yeah, that's Canadian Content. But what about something really Canadian? Like curling.

For the record, the initial post here deals with the risk of getting TB (bovine TB) from raw milk and raw milk products, not listeriosis. Very different diseases. [edit to close parenthesis]

I've had exactly the opposite experience recently in Heidelberg, Salamanca, and various resort towns in France (Le Grau du Roi and Trouville and some others) recently. People strolled the streets eating all sorts of things in all of these locales pretty much non-stop, though in Heidelberg it was pretty much fever pitch by the late afternoon/early evening. What they all these locales have in common is a significant number of tourists and/or students, people with time on their hands. The more they stroll, the more likely they are to get a snack. Visitors to the U.S. are likely to see the same sorts of behaviors if they are in tourist locales. In less touristy locales like Montpellier and Bologna these behaviors were generally confined to the main squares.

I wouldn't characterize the FDA's warning to avoid raw milk products of uncertain provenance as hysteria. Transmission of bovine TB (that article's got some minor scientific inaccuracies) from cows to humans via milk was a huge public health problem in the past, and the reason that milk was pasteurized in the first place.

Raincoats on dogs very impressive. I can't even get my kids to wear them, though those darn opposable thumbs are probably an issue in our case. Great blog. Very nostalgic for the Granville Market, not so much for the food (though that's great) as for the setting.

Those green blue eggs are very pretty. A vendor at one of the local farmer's markets here sells eggs by the dozen that are sort of mix and match, all various sizes and shell colors. When I was a child on my grandmother's farm one of our tasks was to follow some of the more persistent non-coop laying hens and figure out where they were holed up. Usually by the time we'd found the egg it was no longer usable, but we still either disrupted the nest or got my grandmother to do it so as to discourage repeat visits. Remember Jemima Puddleduck and her efforts to lay away from intervention?

I agree. Similar ingredients, similar preps, similar flavors.

Both versions look great. Local places (Atlanta, GA) seem to use some fresh cilantro on top as well.

We can actually buy double yolk eggs here, though I've never done so. And I can't recall where exactly I've seen them for sale---most likely at a farmer's market. Supposedly some breeds double yolk more often than others, and there's some association with younger age of the hen. Do your friends have much trouble getting the hens to lay in the coop (as opposed to under any spare bit of cover they can find)? Of course, it doesn't look like there is too much cover in the field you show them in, so maybe not (if that field is fenced).

despite being a practically wurzel gummidge-esque country bumpkin compared to savvy metropolitans like yourselves i am puzzled.... how do you tell an eggs got a double yolk until you break it? cheers gary ← Candling (transilluminating) eggs reveals all sorts of "flaws". Check out this site for some cool images of candled eggs. I'm pretty sure that big producers have some cool high speed way of doing this, possibly not even using transillumition.

Any dairy side to the operation?

Porridge isn't too commonly used a term here (at least in my experience), but when it is it usually evokes either something to do with the UK or one of the "other" ex-colonies. For us porridge is not specifically made of oats, but of any coarsely ground grain. I'm a big fan of steel cut oats, and also find that doing them overnight in the slow cooker makes them too soft for me.

Here's some advance positive thinking (including the ardent hope that she goes into spontaneous and vigorous labor immediately after an excellent meal this evening, thereby avoiding the fun of induction). Oh, and you left out chocolate. And champagne.

Hey, I'm an easterner and we've got the same weather but warmer. Oh, hold it, I'm a southeasterner. Really looking forward to Vancouver, a very cool place in many respects.

Maybe, maybe not. Induced labors are not infrequently long and tedious, and assuming that she gets pitocin she'll almost certainly get an epidural, which will control all or most of the pain but then she won't be distracted from her hunger. Provide her with as much nourishment as the hospital will permit and she wants. If this requires that you move heaven and earth, well, sometimes you have to move heaven and earth. The courier's a great idea, but I'd have something really amazingly great on hand for immediate consumption, something that doesn't require any real prep. Some great cheese, fresh fruit, juice. I'm pretty sure I was bolting juice before my episiotomy repair. As for breast milk, it won't come in for several (or more) days. The baby will sleep, so should you.

Very true, but as you're conscious you won't aspirate it back into your lungs, so no big deal. Once a woman's labor is really rolling along she's not likely to be too hungry. But if she ends up in a prolonged labor (like my first, with spontaneously ruptured membranes and no real labor for 12 long food- and drinkless hours before pitocin was started, and then another 10 long food- and drinkless hours on pitocin before the final happy moment) she may be very hungry indeed. Food would have been a big help for me, but since I'd ruptured I couldn't stay home like danielle and eat enough to keep my energy up. Sounds like touaregsand and danielle both had much better post-partum meal options than the truly dreadful heart healthy meals offered after the birth of my second child at Stanford (in Palo Alto, CA). It would have taken six of them to make a reasonable meal. I was happy to leave the hospital in well under 24 hours after delivery just so that I could get some actual food. Let's see, some other things that I would have loved post-partum: dim sum, foie gras, sashimi...

Also apparently an exception here: absolutely starving during my first labor, and husband's watching a Braves game during the proceedings (including extraordinarily graphic ads for Church's fried chicken) will never, ever be forgotten. Food's discouraged during labor because of the medical establishment's assumption that you may need to be whisked off for emergency C-section at a moment's notice, and the more recently you've eaten the more likely that you'll vomit under anesthesia and aspirate said vomit into your lungs (icky, yes, but that's what it means) and die, and your survivors will sue. So we labor without so much as a glass of water to comfort us. At a certain point during labor with my first child my husband pointed out that I was perhaps consuming rather more ice chips than I was supposed to. I responded "F*ck that, go get me more ice". Familiar with the vagaries of hospital meal service, I insisted that dinner be ordered for me that night, and that the tray be held until I'd delivered (at about 8 PM). Said meal had, unfortunately, been either consumed by a staff member or returned to the kitchen, so I was left to dine on saltines and cranberry juice. Lots of saltines and cranberry juice. Second labor only lasted an hour or so. Much easier all around. Anyway, once the precious bundle's been delivered you should show up with enormous amounts of food. And really delicious food if you can manage it: eggs Benedict, chilaquiles, pain au chocolat, whatever, just make sure it's great and that there's a lot of it.

Greg's a very cool guy, and a great server (and manager---he was the manager at Blais back in the day). Glad you enjoyed your meal. Next time you're in town maybe we can get some eGulleteers together and show you some more of the local talent.

My god, man, you're a genius! Apologies if you're a woman, by the way---still a stroke of genius. This will be on a Monday night---should I book ahead? The tour (it's not really a pub crawl in the way that I did pub crawls back in the day) starts at 7:00 or 7:30, I think, so it would be late-ish but not really late by the time we ate. And should I try and fit in yet one more meal that day? Hmm...

I think I should probably try and leave at least a bit of a dining lull in between St. John B&W and New Tayyab, don't you? I wasn't going to do dinner that night at all, instead doing a pub crawl/tour along the Thames that evening. But I suppose we could do an early dinner at New Tayyab and then do the pub crawl... Hmm, maybe I could fit dim sum, SJ B&W, tea, New Tayyab, and a pub crawl all into one day.